That Monday Morning Feeling

 

A Long Perspective

It was actually a Thursday, a dreary, overcast evening in late May or early June, 1972. The dull weather didn't matter, though, because it was a good evening on the television: Top Cat, Where in the World (a travel quiz which I unaccountably liked), Top of the Pops, The Goodies. The Cricklewood trio’s antics ended at 8.30, leaving a half hour gap before the Nine O'Clock News. This thirty-minute slot was, for just three weeks, occupied by a short documentary looking at the lives of various working people. It wasn't the kind of programme that held much appeal for me, but for some reason I particularly noticed the title: That Monday Morning Feeling. I was just eleven years old and would not enter the world of work for another eleven years... a whole lifetime in the future. Yet that title, and a passing glimpse of the programme set me thinking about how it might feel when I could go to work instead of going to school. I've always liked a well-turned phrase, and 'That Monday Morning Feeling', with its hint of drudgery and dull routine really caught in my mind. Maybe it was the dreary oppressive atmosphere that held sway on that Thursday evening, but somewhere a connection was made.

It was a phrase I could relate to, even as a schoolboy: going back to school on a Monday morning after a weekend spent playing with toys, drawing, watching television was always a comedown. I didn’t hate school as such, it’s just that I could always find other things to do with my time. Going to work, though, that felt different somehow. No longer under any obligations to teachers, homework, exams. I’d always been intrigued by the notion of ‘going to work’, and had often wondered what my dad did all day in his office job at the GEC in Witton, Birmingham. Sometimes he let my brother and myself have used forms, old desk diaries and suchlike to use as drawing paper, but I was always intrigued at the forms themselves, with their columns and boxes to tick.

Going to work had seemed like something exciting and interesting. Now, along came a programme whose title suggested otherwise. For me, television was a parade of fantasy, comedy and adventure, but here was a glimpse of real life, a hint of what the grown-up world of working people was really like. I didn’t sit down and watch any of those three programmes, but the title really set me thinking, and I’ve remembered it all this time.

Fifty-one years later, glancing through the pages of my diary for that year, I was reminded of that Thursday evening so long ago and how it made me stop and think, if only for a moment, about the grown-up world I would one day inhabit. What kind of a place would I find myself working in? As things turned out, I would ultimately spend less than a decade actually 'going out to work'. From 1991 onwards, my workplace became the home. How would I have felt to be confronted then with the knowledge of where my future lay? Back in 1972, the future was still mysterious and intriguing. All manner of possibilities lay in wait: growing up, going to work, marriage, a home, perhaps even children. It didn't seem too much to hope for: I'd been to the weddings of a couple of cousins and guessed something similar must lie somewhere over my own horizon. By the following year, I had even found myself a potential role model in the shape of Likely Lad Bob Ferris. I seriously saw myself married to someone like Thelma and living somewhere like the Elm Lodge Housing Estate... modest ambitions indeed, but it was, after all, the 1970s, and middle class suburbia was my milieu.

Ultimately, none of this happened. But now, as I confront the end of my own working life, it's strange to look back at myself standing on the brink of the grown-up world and wondering what kind of life and career lay ahead of me. Strange and, I have to say, ineffably sad. Stumbling across that memory brought to mind some lines of Philip Larkin... not, as one might expect, his meditations on what he called 'the toad work' but rather, the following observation, set down in his poem 'Reference Back':

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

What I have as it once was... curiosity, hope, a child's naive outlook on a life still to be lived. This is indeed a long perspective, one that, perhaps, it is best not to contemplate for too long. Larkin was actutely aware of time and its effect on people's lives... in another verse he writes of life as 'the unbeatable slow machine that brings what you get'. I know now what the machine brought for me, just as I know for certain that I will never experience 'that Monday morning feeling' again. And somehow, the world seems a sadder place for it.

However Many Years it is of Eurovision, it's Too Many

Is there anywhere on Earth a more worthless endeavour than the Eurovision Song Contest? What little I saw of this year’s effort was enough to convince me that it was designed by AI and performed by ChatBots. In all the five-hour farrago, there wasn’t a single entrant who didn’t conform to the required stereotype of pretty girl/boy/don’t know from central casting whose costume designer was having a laugh at their expense. As you were – I believe I spotted a bunch of scary men from Germany playing an inappropriate heavy rock song (also obligatory).

Eurovision, like so much of modern life, has become a victim of overthinking. What was once a one-night event has now become a sprawling multi-media monster, dragging out over weeks of heats, semi-finals and endless pontification (most of it courtesy of the BBC, whose curation smacks increasingly of entitlement). Eurovision is clearly organised by the kind of people who believe Christmas begins in September – people to whom the philosphy ‘less is more’ might as well be written in Sanskrit. This year, horrors, it came from Liverpool, which meant that, the night before on BBC4, we got an evening of Liverpool-related music. Whoever it was that managed to conceptually drag Paul McCartney into the whole tawdry celebration should be sent to a Gulag along with the bloke who came on at the end last night and murdered John Lennon’s Imagine whilst wearing a kind of semi-transparent vest/shirt. He couldn’t sing to save his life. But these days, who can?

The contest can’t even deliver on the promise of its own title. Originally intended as a celebration of songwriting (I’ll come back to this later), it has descended into a textbook example of style over content, the ‘songs’ reduced to mere noise intended as accompaniment for a lot of slick, garish visuals. This kind of schtick – fireworks going off every ten seconds, cascades of silver foil, audiences whooping every time the ‘artist’ throws another shape – used to be the preserve of X Factor and its ilk. It has as much to do with songwriting as songwriting has to do with quantum physics. Less, in fact. Then there’s the whole ‘Euro’ thing. Ignoring the supreme hubris and hypocrisy of Britain still feeling entitled to participate in any event with the dreaded ‘Euro’ suffix, the contest today welcomes entrants from nations who by no stretch of the imagination have ever belonged to Europe. You can’t get further from Europe than Australia, unless there’s anyone on the Moon who fancies having a crack. And to return momentarily to the thorny issue of Britain in Europe, I wonder how many of those hosting Eurovision parties last night voted for Brexit? You can all hang your heads in shame, and fuck off while you’re doing it. Of course, since Brexit, Britain can never hope to win Eurovision. Last night, ‘our’* entry was placed second from last. Of course, the community is fine with Britain hosting the whole stupendo-expensive spectacle, which no nation can reasonably afford given the parlous state of so many economies. Not that politics can be allowed to impinge on proceedings. Zelensky was threatening to do a stand-up routine about the Ukraine war but was asked not to bother because the organisers had already lined up Kate Middleton and she’s a lot easier on the eye. Plus, it probably made her feel as if she was doing something worthwhile. Whatever the organisers think, though, Eurovision has always been political – one only has to look at the way the voting has been carved up between ‘friendly’ nations, and then there’s the notorious example of Franco bribing the judges in 1968 which scuppered Cliff’s chances of winning with Congratulations.

[* I say ‘our’ but I don’t include myself in this. ‘Not my Eurovision’ one might say.]

But hold on just a moment – today’s Eurovision might be a campy, asethetically-challenged parade of vacuous horse manure, but was it ever anything else? I’ve wracked my memory to try and think of a single good song to have emerged from the far-too-many years of Eurovision, and I’ve come up with just one – Abba’s Waterloo. It would, in retrospect, turn out not to be Abba’s greatest hit, but on the night (and I sat through the whole 1974 contest), it was a clear winner from the opening bars. It may not be a ‘great’ song, but it was hooky and memorable, two qualities that today’s crop of songwriters are signally lacking. I quite liked All Kinds of Everything, Dana’s winning entry from 1970, but in the interests of fair play, feel obliged to point out that a key, six-note phrase of the melody was ‘borrowed’ from Wonderful Land, a 1962 hit for The Shadows. [Fans of conspiracy theory may be intrigued to know that the composer of Wonderful Land, Jerry Lordan, went on to pen Dana’s next single (which flopped).] Love is Blue (Luxembourg’s winning entry of 1967) wasn’t without merit, and provided a sizeable hit across Europe for its composer, but I’m hard pressed to think of anything beyond this and Abba that had much of a shelf life away from the contest. 

So, three songs out of hundreds. Is that really it? ‘Hold on’, I hear you cry, ‘what about Love Shine a Light, Katrina and the Waves’ winning entry of 1997?’ Well, what about it? Can you remember how it goes, because I can’t. QED.

On the whole, Eurovision hasn’t done a lot to promote the art of popular song. If anything, it’s had a detrimental effect. One only has to consider some of Britain’s entries – Puppet on a String (even Sandie Shaw herself derided it as rubbish); Boom Bang-a-Bang; Clodagh Rogers’ Jack in the Box; Save Your Kisses For Me. At least they were memorable, unlike today’s efforts, but never in a good way. I’ve already mentioned The Shadows, and even they managed to get themselves embroiled in the contest with Britain’s 1975 entry, Let Me Be the One (hardly a high point of the band’s career).

In the course of writing this polemic, I had cause to consult Wikipedia’s list of Britain’s entries since we first competed in 1957 (the contest’s second year), and of those 66 entries, there were only 14 I knew well enough to be able to hum the melody. The bulk of them I didn’t even recognise as titles. Not that I’ve paid much attention to the contest these past thirty odd years. On occasions, I’ve tuned in more from a kind of horrified curiosity than any genuine interest, but back in the 60s and 70s I watched it every year. My earliest recollection is Sandie Shaw winning in 1967. Barefoot, and wearing what looked like a babydoll nightie, she looked as if she’d been got out of bed to perform. Later, we rooted for Cliff (in ‘68 and ‘73) and his mates the Shads in ‘75 (who might have done better had Bruce Welch not fumbled the lyrics), but in general, I found it hard to find much love for Britain’s entries. One often got the impression that artists had been talked into taking part by their management, whereas today it’s easy to imagine an arena full of shallow wannabe celebrities falling over themselves to be chosen. Since the 1970s, no artist of the first rank has competed, and anyone with an iota of integrity and credibility has given the contest a wide berth. Yet still it goes on, and will almost certainly continue to do so. One really does have to ask why? How much did it cost to host this year’s event, and wouldn’t that money have been better spent elsewhere in this cash-strapped economy?

It’s high time we put Eurovision out of its misery. And ours.

Whatever Happened to You?

The Likely Lads of Popular Culture

Dave (1975) and Tim (2021) pose in front of the same patio door...

Nostalgia for old television. When did it get started? I’m sure that in my early childhood there were probably those who held fond memories of Sylvia Peters and the days when dinner jacketed BBC announcers addressed the nation surrounded by parlour palms and aspidistras. But it’s not something one heard the grown ups discussing. Television was certainly a topic of conversation, but it was decidedly in the present tense. As a genuinely popular cultural phenomenon, television didn’t really take a hold in Britain until the mid-50s, which means that when I first encountered it, it was barely five years old. And nostalgia takes a little longer than that to ferment…

For me, I think it all began around 1970, when I developed a fascination, bordering on the obsessive, with Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5. The series had been off air for just four years, but at the age of nine, that’s almost half a lifetime. All I had to remind me of the show was a few annuals, and a couple of toys that had survived almost intact. For months I fixated on Fireball, reading the books, playing with the toys. I even took my plastic Fireball XL5 toy on our family holiday. In the autumn, it seemed as if my obsession had borne fruit, because lo and behold, in the middle of September, timed to coincide with the debut of Gerry Anderson’s UFO, our local ITV station, ATV Midlands, began a repeat run of my favourite series.

I’m not sure that any of my friends at school shared my interest in Fireball XL5 and the work of Gerry Anderson in general. My brother went along with it, and was bought all the same toys, but I don’t think he ever quite went for the world of puppets the way I did. Nor did I know anyone who took much interest in another strand of television that was just beginning to pique my interest – the action/adventure series produced by ITC, which were entering a kind of afterlife of repeat runs.

In the spring of 1972, a school friend of my brother, two years younger than myself, became a regular visitor to our house. Tim, then aged just nine, was mad about any kind of audio gadgetry, which at the time amounted to tape recorders and record players. He had a tiny portable tape recorder with three-inch spools onto which he would record snippets from the television, most notably The Saint, which was being repeated on Friday evenings. It took a while for me to get to know him properly, but Tim would become one of the first people with whom I could share my enthusiasms for television and films, both old and new. In time, we would revisit series I dimly remembered, including ITC’s Strange Report and, most notably, The Prisoner.

In 1973, I moved up to the local grammar school, where I met another fellow traveller. Dave shared the same enthusiasms I’d picked up on over the years: Gerry Anderson, James Bond, Dr. Who, comics and old annuals. We began what might be termed ‘competitive collecting’, in as much as we were in the market for the same items, usually hard to find. Once, memorably, Dave whipped an old Supercar Annual from under my nose on a bookstall at the school’s Christmas Bazaar of 1975. I had to make do with an Avengers Annual from 1968, itself a rarity, but not in the same league as Supercar. Until that moment, neither of us had even seen a Supercar Annual, so this was a significant find. In fairness, he later loaned it out to me for a few weeks. Such is the danger of sharing your enthusiasms with your mates. As collectors of vintage ephemera we were a kind of Likely Lads of Popular Culture, chasing not girls but Doctor Who annuals, and occasionally falling out over them. I’m not sure who was who, but Dave looked more like Rodney Bewes than I did...

Still visible under the thumbprints: Dave, and Annuals, in our back garden, summer 1975

We were better matched with the Man from UNCLE paperback series which we both collected during 1974 and 75, these being somewhat easier to find (until you got past No.8… see my separate post for a full round-up of the UNCLE book mania).

While I stayed on at the grammar school to take ‘A’ levels, Dave left school after the ‘O’ level exams and I never saw him again after the summer of 1977. I’d begun to suspect he was losing interest in collecting, after his cool response when I found another, earlier Supercar Annual a few months after the incident at the Bazaar. I was ultimately proved wrong, for of the two of us, it was Dave who turned out to be the serious comic collector. Despite a tentative career in local industry, he somehow found his way into the world of buying and selling comics as a professional enterprise. When our parents met up by chance a few years later, I was told that Dave was now doing very nicely thank you working as a comic dealer out of New York. His career trajectory from that point onwards is unknown to me, but by the early 90s he was running a shop in Cambridge and, later, began working for the comics publisher Titan Books.

Dave dropping off the radar came as less of a loss than it might have done, because during the preceding year and a half, Tim had become a much more significant figure in my life. It helped that he lived within walking distance while Dave’s house was a bus ride away, and while Dave had other interests like football to distract him, Tim shared my antipathy for the ‘beautiful game’. Saturday afternoons for us meant trips up to Sherwoods’ film library in Birmingham, or the junk shops of Walsall, in search of TV tie-ins from the 1960s. If Dave and I had been the Likely Lads of Man from UNCLE paperbacks, then Tim and I became Bob and Terry in our enthusiasm for 8mm films of old TV series.

It was with Tim rather than Dave that I kindled my enthusiasm for the ITC series: we were both glued to the screen for the repeat run of Strange Report in 1976, albeit Tim’s glue had rather more adhesion than mine. When the series moved from its Sunday afternoon slot after only three episodes, it became a moveable feast across the schedule, liable to pop up on random Friday mornings before settling into a more consistent run as a weekday afternoon filler. Although he should have been at school for most of these broadcasts, Tim ‘bunked off’, something our mum would never have countenanced. The repeats primed us for the more significant return, in late August, of The Prisoner. I doubt if any screening of a television series was ever more keenly anticipated. We knew about it months ahead of time, via the television column in the Birmingham Evening Mail, and we were ready and waiting at 11pm on Thursday August 26.

Just as Dave outclassed me in comic collecting, so too did Tim. I was the first of us to own an 8mm sound projector, but it was Tim who provided the films we watched on it, making trips over to Dudley to hire episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney and even The Beatles’s Magical Mystery Tour. It was Tim who went on to collect 16mm films, and ultimately, original broadcast prints of our favourite series on 35mm film. It was Tim who turned his obsession into a profitable business whilst I shouted encouragement from the sidelines. My own choice of career – illustrator cum graphic designer – was just about scraping along, so when Tim invited me to join his company I was grateful for the opportunity.

But of the three of us, only I remain to tell the story. In the past week I have learned of the death of Dave, with whom I had tentatively and briefly re-established contact via email some five years ago. But despite a flurry of communication over the space of a few weeks, we never did get to meet up face to face.

Tragically, Tim died suddenly in November 2022, bringing to an untimely end a friendship I imagined would endure into our dotage. I could even picture us, in his home cinema, still guffawing at his favourite junky, spliced-to-hell 16mm print of Jason King. As Simon and Garfunkel sang on their Bookends album: ‘How terribly strange to be seventy… and old friends’. A milestone we will, sadly, never see.

Tim was in my life for fifty years, from 1972-2022, Dave just shy of four years, 1973-77. Without them, the journey would have been a hell of a lot less fun.

In memory of Tim Beddows, 1963-2022 and David Hanks, 1960-2023

Goodbye, Sodium

An Edward Hopper-esque atmosphere on the packaging for Corgi's lamp standards kit.

I was fascinated by some strange things as a child. Pylons and cooling towers to name but two, and both from an extremely early age. For some reason, I found various aspects of the man-made environment intriguing, and none more so than street lights. I was reminded of this only last week, when, at twilight, I exited the M1 at Junction 24A. Along the sliproad leading up to the roundabout, the streetlights were glowing a soft shade of pink indicating that they had only just come on. Set against the misty pinkish-blue of the twilight, it made for an atmospheric moment, and one which I realised, with a pang of nostalgia, may never happen again. 

The reason for this is quite simple: LPS (Low Pressure Sodium) street lamps – the ubiquitous orange type that have dominated Britain’s major roads since the 1950s – are being phased out. As of 2019, the last factory producing the lantern units closed, and no more will be made. Anyone who has been out after dark on our major roads in the past few years can’t have failed to notice that the old ‘orange’ night time atmosphere is slowly disappearing, with modern LED lamps taking the place of the older units. Presumably this is being done for reasons of cost efficiency as much as anything else, and the improved colour spectrum of LED lights is claimed to bring benefits in road safety. I’m sure this is true, but I still regret the passing of the old sodium vapour lighting columns.

As a child, two aspects of street lights fascinated me: their colour, and the style of the lighting columns themselves. There was one right outside our house in Lichfield, a concrete column with right-angled bracket, on which was mounted a small, rectangular lamp. When first lit at twilight, the lamp glowed a soft pink, gradually acquiring the distinctive orange hue of sodium. The pink glow has a technical explanation: this initial colour comes from what’s known as ‘Penning mixture’, a blend of gases – usually helium or neon with xenon – used as a ‘starter’ to warm the metal sodium inside the lamp. I saw these colours in terms of confectionery: a strawberry Spangle, followed by an orange Spangle.

The original 1950s column was still in place outside our old home when I took this photo in 1980.
Needless to say, it has long since been replaced.

Not all street lamps were orange, though. Our dad provided the explanation: orange street lamps like the one outside our house were ‘sodium vapour’ whilst the greenish-white sort I’d seen elsewhere were ‘mercury vapour’. The latter were more often to be found on smaller suburban streets, typically mounted on distinctive metal columms, often quite ornate in appearance, topped by a ‘swan-neck’ lamp bracket. In the 1960s, however, mercury lamps could still be found on major roads around the country, to which they lent a ghostly greenish-white light (as mentioned by C.P. Snow in his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels). Eachelhurst Road in Erdington, which we regularly travelled along on visits to our grandparents, was one stretch of highway I recall seeing under mercury vapour, the lamps sitting atop tall metal columns painted green that probably dated from the 1940s or 50s. Increasingly, though, sodium was becoming the norm.

On trips in our dad’s car at night, I would marvel at the sheer variety of lighting columns. On our grandparents’ road, the lanterns had a distinctive ‘witches hat’ or flying saucer appearance, whilst along the major roads leading into Birmingham a curious suspension system was still in use, whereby a single lantern hung over the middle of the carriageway, slung on chains between two columns mounted at the roadside: a configuration which I believe may have been associated with facilities for tram wires. Around Walsall, where there had definitely been ‘column-sharing’ between lighting and tram wires, one could still see examples of lamps on long metal brackets extending from the poles, some of which still had their old electric insulators and even wires attached. Around more prestigious areas, such as civic buildings, a ‘posh’ type of street lamp predominated. In Birmingham, these took the form of fluted metal columns, painted a discrete powder blue, topped with huge lighting units that gave out a white neon light (sodium was evidently too proletarian for such locations). Still further up the scale of prestige were the lamps to be found around the Cathedral and along Colmore Row in Birmingham City Centre, which employed the same pale blue fluted columns, but were topped off by columnar lights which stood upright. These units, known as ‘Festival’, were manufactured by a local company, REVO, based in Tipton. Few if any survive today, with some of the last known examples being the so-called ‘Richardson Candles’ of Cambridge.

Sourced from http://www.simoncornwell.com/lighting/collect/columns/index.htm

If we ever ventured further afield, I would always notice variations in the style of lamp standards, as civic authorities all tended to use different, often local sources of supply. Some of the older survivors were often extremely ornate, with baroque styling, but these struck me as excessive, and I prefered the more minimalist designs that had been introduced in the post-war era. If I had a favourite style of street light, it was surely the twin-lamp column, as seen so often on the central reservations of dual carriageways, on motorways, and at roundabouts and major road junctions.

I even had toy street lights bought for me, partly to add realism to games with toy cars but mostly because I liked them so much. Corgi offered a ‘kit’ of modern sodium lighting columns (to say it was a ‘kit’ was a bit much: all one had to do was to plug the column into a metal baseplate and attach the plastic lantern to the top), whilst Dinky toys had their own equivalent. Lego also provided street lights to enhance its plastic block environment. Needless to say, none of these examples actually worked, although electric versions would later become available for use on model railway layouts.

Toy street lamps: Dinky, far left/ unknown centre/ Corgi far right/ Lego, foreground

Like so many other items of street furniture, street lamps are somewhat ephemeral. Although installations often endure for decades, wear and tear and the failure of lanterns ensures that most will in time be replaced. 1960s columns were still a common sight on most arterial roads until well into the 1990s, and odd survivors can still be found, usually in overlooked corners that have escaped the ravages of modern redevelopment. I live on a major road whose concrete lighting columns date to the early 1980s and are almost certain to be replaced in the not too distant future. The lanterns are still the old LPS type, which lends a rather 1970s orange vibe to the night time environment.

Despite my abiding interest in street lights, it wasn’t until the age of maybe 13 that I became aware of one of the peculiar characteristics of sodium light: it has a very narrow spectrum, which renders all colours in shades of grey. I first noticed this whilst trying to read a TV21 Annual in the back of our dad’s car on an evening in 1974, when I noticed that the colour pictures in the book appeared monochrome under the light from the passing streetlamps. Sodium does present one distinct advantage over lanterns with a wider spectrum, in that it causes less ‘light pollution’. Astronomical observatories are able to filter out sodium light to give them a clearer view of the night sky, but this cannot be done with modern LED units.

It seems a pity that modern designers can’t hold a (Richardson) candle to those of the 50s, 60s and earlier eras, and contemporary lighting columns are unremarkable in appearance. Practicality (and cost, one assumes) has won out over asethetics. Shame.

On Again! On Again!

 

Discovering (and rediscovering) Jake Thackray

That’s Life! was regular viewing in our household. We’d been tuning in since its inception in 1973, so when a new series began on Sunday 2 January 1977, we were in front of the set at 10pm. 

The programme remains in my memory for a very specific reason, as it provided my first ever glimpse of an entertainer who had been established on television for almost a decade without ever impinging onto my consciousness. Jake Thackray, often misleadingly labelled as the ‘Yorkshire Nöel Coward’, had been a regular fixture on Braden’s Week from 1968-1972, a popular late-night entertainment which, like That’s Life!, had focused on consumer issues, alongside topical songs and sketches. In 1972, however, Braden had given the BBC pause for thought by appearing in a margarine commercial. The corporation deemed this unacceptable for a champion of consumer rights, and whilst Braden wasn’t directly sacked, his show was revamped to allow his co-presenter Esther Rantzen to take centre stage in his place. The rest is television history, as was Braden himself when That’s Life! launched without him in the early summer of 1973.

Esther Rantzen had been personally responsible for Thackray getting the gig on the Braden show in 1968, so it’s somewhat surprising he didn’t transfer to the new series. Like Braden’s Week, That’s Life! still featured a topical ‘song of the week’, but it would be nearly four years before the self-styled chansonnier was restored to his erstwhile position on the series. Now, two days into the new year of 1977, here he was at last, performing the title track of his new album, On Again! On Again!, his first release in five years.

I was immediately taken with this charismatic newcomer, but more than anything else, I liked the sound he created. Thackray was backed by a double bass player, Alan Williams, and session guitarist Ike Isaacs (who had previously accompanied him on Braden’s Week), and together they created a laid-back, jazzy sound reminiscent of the 1950s. The song itself was somewhat risqué, its opening line a paen to the hindquarters of the female anatomy. Let’s not bandy words: ‘I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day’ he sang. In the next line, he used this observation as the basis for an extremely erudite bit of wordplay which I only fully understood many decades later: ‘to me it is palpable proof of God’s existence a posteriori’. The song was well-received, and although its sentiments were hardly in tune with the world view of a naive, uncynical 15-year-old like myself, I was instantly hooked. I began to note down Thackray’s appearances (and even non-appearances) in my diary. Fortunately for his fans, this series of That’s Life! remains intact in the BBC’s archives, and Jake’s performances were recently extracted for inclusion on a definitive DVD collection compiling all known surviving clips of the man during his BBC career, spanning the years 1968-1985. For fans, it is a revelation, for me, remarkable to see those old That’s Life! appearances again for the first time in 47 years.

Thackray was an intriguing, enimatic figure. Self-taught in both singing and guitar playing, and strongly influenced by the French chanson tradtion (as exemplified by Jacques Brel and, more pertinently, Georges Brassens), he had begun his career whilst working as a secondary school teacher in Leeds in the mid-1960s. Gravitating to local radio, his cause was championed by a BBC producer whose influence led to his being picked up on the national network and – almost unbelievably for an artist with no professional engagements to his credit – acquiring a recording contract with EMI. His first LP, The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray, was recorded at Abbey Road in 1967 while the Beatles were busy in the adjoining studio working on the soundtrack of their TV film Magical Mystery Tour. The fab four quickly picked up on Thackray’s quirky, humorous songs, and it’s reported that John Lennon took a tape of them with him to Rishikesh in 1968.

Thackray’s style of songwriting actually had more in common with the observational songs of Ray Davies, but it’s safe to say his approach was entirely his own. His primary influence was Georges Brassens, a major figure in his homeland of France but vitually unknown in the UK, and it was Brassens’s style of performance, accompanying himself on a nylon-string guitar, that Jake adopted, ending up with a unique hybrid of bluff northern gallic. Lyrically, his abilities outshone his contemporaries and remain unmatched to this day. A graduate in English language and literature, Thackray’s vocabulary went way beyond that of any other popular songwriter, and his ability to dovetail words together in perfect rhyme and metre remains unsurpassed. Stylistically, he was an acquired taste, with a curious singing voice that veered between bass/baritone in one line and a light near falsetto tenor the next. Words were often spat out or bitten off, in a half-singing-half-talking manner. He was not, technically, a great singer, but he had immense warmth and humanity, his pitching was always accurate and his style sounded like no one else on earth. Bernard Braden, in his sleeve notes for Jake’s second LP, reports that his initial appearances on the show led to a significant number of letters requesting his removal. Viewer reaction soon turned around, however, and within a matter of months, Jake Thackray was a household name. Just not in our household.

1977 was something of a career renaissance for Jake, with the That’s Life! spots cannily lined up ahead of a new record release. After three studio albums and a live collection for EMI, Jake’s career had turned back to performance in the early 70s, although even in this arena, he was a reluctant star, who would baulk at the idea of appearing at a 500-seater venue, preferring the intimacy of small folk clubs and pubs. I soon located the new LP in record shops, along with a couple of others from his rapidly disappearing back catalogue. At my birthday in March ‘77, I was bought the new album, and with birthday money purchased EMI’s Very Best of Jake Thackray compilation, which afforded a useful overview of his career to date. Or, to put it another way, his career in full – very nearly.

During the 1977 run of That’s Life!, Jake appeared more than a dozen times, singing carefully chosen numbers from the new album (not all were suitable for broadcast), alongside some old favourites. Although his songs were frequently intended to amuse, I seldom found them laugh out loud funny (some of the humour went way over my head at the time), but his storytelling was unmatched, and his compositions could just as easily be lyrical and melancholic. I found I liked these songs as much as (if not better) than the more overtly comic numbers. Another aspect of Thackray’s performance that interested me was his guitar technique, a simplified variation of the standard folkie ‘clawhammer’ style, focusing heavily on bass notes. I began to practise playing in this manner, and learned some of his songs. My diary for 31 December 1977 includes the entry: ‘did Jake Thackray impression at party’. At a month or so shy of 17 I was far too young to have carried this off convincingly, and my voice nowhere near deep enough to have been as accurate as it sounded in my head, but I’d discovered a new influence. Over forty years later, the voice is still there, but has matured: I open my mouth, and out comes Thackray. It’s a little unnerving…

Back in 1978 I’m sure I fully expected Jake to be back in harness when That’s Life! returned for a new series on 14 May, but I was disappointed. He would not return to television for another three years when the BBC finally gave him his own short-lived series, Jake Thackray and Songs. It was not for want of asking. Television may have made him a star, but Jake detested appearing on the ‘flickering rectangle’, denouncing TV production types on his final album sleeve as being characterised by headphones, cheesecloth and ‘frig’, qualities which, he was happy to report, had not been present during the filming of this low-key series, shot in the intimate atmosphere of a small club.

I could have seen Jake Thackray perform live many times during the coming decade, but never did: I often spotted his name in the listings for folk clubs not far from where I was living. But by this time in his career, seeing Jake’s name on a concert bill was no guarantee of seeing the man himself, and he was beginning to acquire a reputation as a no-show. Two agents washed their hands of him, tired of the endless (if imaginative) excuses with which he explained his all too frequent non-appearances. His career was self-destructing. The recently published biography ‘Beware of the Bull’ makes for quite harrowing reading in its latter stages. A staunch Catholic, Thackray seems to have been troubled by the idea of taking pride in himself and his work, and since his Jesuit schooldays had signed off all written work with the initials ‘AMDG’: ‘Ad maiorem Dei Gloriam’ (to the Glory of God). Towards the end of his life, when approached by fans enthusing about his work, he insisted that many of his songs were, in his opinion, worthless, citing some particular concert favourites as examples. He was also a committed socialist, and his lyrics often took devastating aim at those in society who lord it over others through entitlement and privilege. His late classic song ‘the Bull’ reads almost like his manifesto as it undermines those who set themselves up in authority only to use their privileged positions to drop ‘bullshite’ on the poor ‘bleeders below’.

Jake’s final years were spent in a council flat in Monmouth, estranged from his wife, suffering from alcoholism and surviving on hand-outs from friends and well-wishers. The last photographs of him, taken close to the end of his life in 2002, depict a man unrecognisable as the chisel-featured Byronic figure of the late 60s and early 70s. In a late flowering of enthusiasm, he had been fired up with the idea of a musical production based on his works when it was put to him late the same year. Tragically, he was found dead in his flat on Christmas Eve, aged only 64.

Since then, his legacy has been kept alive by a dedicated fan network whose efforts culimated last year in the release of the aforementioned DVD. Although TV rarely showed Jake at his best (his nervousness is quite obvious at times), this is a superb overview of his career, beginning with his very first TV spot (Beryl Reid Says Good Evening, 1968) and taking in all known surviving clips from the BBC’s archive until his disappearance from the medium in the mid 1980s.

There are few artists in the world of popular music who are genuine one-offs, but Jake Thackray is one of them. He was nothing less than a genius, extradorinarily original and utterly unrepeatable. 

The Last Snow of Childhood

 

Snow in the garden, Lichfield, circa 1964

It’s a sentiment one occasionally hears from persons of a certain age: the notion that the winters of our childhood were snowier than those of today. Certainly most winters would include at least one significant fall of snow, often around January or February, but much depended upon where one was living. In the midlands, where our family lived, snowfall was probably close to average. The memorably snowy winter of 1962-63 lies just beyond the limits of my recollection, but there were some heavy snowfalls during the next few years, one of them captured in a photograph.

As a child, one hoped for two things whenever it snowed: firstly, that the snow would settle deeply enough to allow one to play out in it, and secondly that it would lie on the ground for a few days. I judged a snowfall to have been a good one when it completely covered the lawn, so that not so much as the merest tip of a grass stalk was visible. Timing was also critical: if the snow fell during the week, there would be fewer opportunities to get out and play other than in the school playground, where snowball fights were discouraged.

An ideal snowfall would occur on a Friday, allowing the whole weekend for snow-based fun in the garden. There were no hills where we lived, so sledging was never an option: accordingly, I never owned one, and have no ‘Rosebud’ memories to look back on. Even so, a heavy snowfall was always cause for celebration. My earliest diary entry that mentions snow is from Friday 7 January 1972: ‘Today it has snowed heavily and settled very thick. Am hoping to play in it tomorrow.’ And play in it I most certainly did. The timing was propitious, this being the last weekend of the Christmas and New Year break (we did not return to school until Monday 10 January). The diary records no further falls of snow that winter, and judging from weather records, the months of November and December 1972 offered nothing like the kind of snowfall we’d seen in January. The next mention of snow comes in my diary for 1973, exactly fifty years ago this weekend, and once again, the timing was perfect.

On the afternoon of Saturday 20 January 1973, we had been shopping in the local town, and on returning to the car, snow was starting to fall. It came down in the kind of thick, cloying flakes that accumulate quickly and easily, and continued on into the evening, finally petering out around 8pm. I’d been dividing my time between reading comics – as the diary shows, I’d been bought no fewer than three different titles that day – and watching television. Dr. Who’s serial The Three Doctors had reached its fourth and final part, but the item that remains most clearly in my memory is the evening’s feature film, part of BBC1’s ‘High Adventure’ strand.

Invasion was a 1965 sci-fi thriller with a curiously intense, claustrophobic atmosphere. It had much of the feel of a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who, unsurprisingly, considering that the storyline came from DW contributor Robert Holmes (who reused some aspects in his 1970 serial Spearhead from Space). The plot concerns the arrival on earth of a group of alien visitors, the Lystrans, who take over a cottage hospital, enclosing it within a force field, which causes the temperature within the field to rise rapidly (the aliens were played by oriental actors, which reminded me of Gerry Anderson’s UFO). But it was the ‘extreme heat’ aspect of the plot that really fit in with the actual events of the evening. With the snow falling outside, our central heating was running at its usual ‘semi-tropical’ setting, but I was more concerned about the temperature outside. I’d seen the snow accumulating in the garden, but was worried as to whether it would last the night. When the film was over, I crept into the darkened back room and peered out between thick curtains at the snow-covered garden, pale and mysterious in the reflected light of the lying snow. I could hear water dripping from the guttering, and the snow in front of the french windows was dotted with small spots where the drips had been falling. This was not a good sign. Our mum, having heard the dripping, said she thought it was thawing already. This would be a calamity! There was more than enough snow out there to allow for the building of snowmen, but this was not an activity that could be undertaken in the dark. There followed an anxious night during which I hoped against hope that the snow might still be there in the morning. I was right to be worried: the met office report for January 1973 refers specifically to extensive falls of snow between the 19th and 21st, but also records that ‘it was too warm for snow to accumulate to any great depth or to lie for very long’.

My fears proved unfounded, for the next morning, the snow still lay to a depth of two or three inches in the back garden: more than enough for what I planned to do. The day was bright and sunny, as is often the case after a heavy snowfall, and we headed out into the garden right after breakfast, where we made not one, but two snowmen, one of them, apparently, a ‘snow soldier’. Exactly what it was about him that signified his military status, I can’t remember, but what is significant is that I built two snowmen, as though aware that I had to make the most of an opportunity which might not come again. The diary also records that I made an igloo, although this structure was clearly scaled to fit the Action Man-sized Man from UNCLE figures I’d taken out into the snow. The idea of building an igloo was one I’d had for some time, and I was determined to try it out. It was not easy, as the mounds of snow had a tendency to collapse once hollowed out. Maybe I knew this was to be my last chance.

The snow was still with us on Monday but this was a school day, and the diary records that, by Wednesday, it was all gone. I didn’t realise it, but those snowmen were the last I would ever build, and that snowy weekend was the very last time I played in the snow as a child. The winter of ‘73-’74 contained no notable falls of snow, and in March 1974 I became that dreaded phenomenon, the teenager. By the time of the next snowy winter (1976-77) I was too old for making snowmen and igloos in the back garden…

Looking back, I can still recall my anxiety that the snow of January 1973 would last long enough to allow us to play out in it. It’s almost as if, somehow, I knew this was to be my last chance. One thing I do know now is the answer to that legendary poetic question posed in the 16th Century by François Villon: ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’ Answer: in my 1973 diary.

The Lost World of the Magazine Rack

It was a funny looking thing, all white wire and red plastic feet, a classic piece of ‘atom age’ design that my parents must have acquired when setting up home together in the late 1950s. I neither noticed nor appreciated its retro asethetic: it was just part of the living room furniture, like the tall ashtray in red enamel and chrome where our dad stubbed out his cigarettes. But, over time, the magazine rack acquired a strange fascination. It became, in effect, a Sargasso Sea of print; for any item deposited therein was destined to remain there seemingly forever, escaping our mum’s weekly purges of printed ephemera: newspapers, magazines and comics were routinely left out for the dustmen (no one had heard of reycling back then). Being consigned to the magazine rack seemed to confer a special status on whatever was left there. Rather than the daily newspapers, or weekly periodicals like the TV and Radio Times, it became a repository of items that, I presumed, my parents wished to retain for slightly longer. Whether that was so, or whether the contents accrued there by random chance I never discovered.

The magazine rack tended to find its way into overlooked corners of the living room, such as the recess between a faux leather armchair and the 1950s coffee table on which stood our dad’s Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. On dull days, typically in school holidays or wet weekends, I would occasionally turn my attention to its contents.

I can still name some of that neglected ephemera in specific detail. There was usually an Embassy Cigarettes Gift Catalogue (our dad smoked the brand and collected the coupons which could be exchanged for household goods); a home-making magazine such as the ubiquitous Family Circle; an overlooked Readers’ Digest from several autumns gone by; perhaps a motoring magazine, and the ever-present Christmas edition of Punch.

Alongside this random selection one might find a few instruction manuals for hi-fi or tape recorders, but rarely anything recent. Only the Embassy Catalogue ever seemed to change, as each new edition was mailed out.

There’s one item that I haven’t yet mentioned, and it was the reason why I returned, with increasing frequency, to the magazine rack. Tucked away amongst the magazine survivors was a curious book printed ‘the wrong way round’ (ie. in landscape format), and with a single word daubed in white across a corner of the cover: GILES. This was my first ever sighting of the famous cartoon albums that had been an annual event since 1944, and which would continue onwards to the present day (depite the fact that Giles himself died in 1995). The book belonged to our dad, who had received it as a gift from his parents at Christmas 1967. From conversations I had with him later, I learned that the Giles Annual had been a yearly tradition, and that he’d been given every one since their first appearance. This was amazing! Where were they now? (By this time, I’d taken to collecting Giles in a big way). Unfortunately, they’d gone the way of all such perceived ‘ephemeral’ items. Before he left home, they’d been in his old bedroom, but had long since been thrown out. As for the others, a decade’s worth spanning the years 1957-66, our mum had taken care of them. As Basil Fawlty once said, ‘lucky old bin’.

The survivor dated from 1967 – our first year in our second home – and its cover depicted a croquet match taking place on the lawn of a lovingly-depicted manor house. The players are all reacting to the arrival of a fizzing bomb that has been hurled onto the lawn: the drawing continues onto the back cover where we can see the culprits: a band of football-scarf-wearing and rattle-toting young tearaways in the typical Giles manner. The front-to-back gag was a running feature of every Giles album, with some layed out in the manner of our example, whilst others offered ‘before and after’ versions of a comic scenario.

Giles annuals tended to end up in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, a fact acknowledged in at least one of his cartoons by Giles himself, so clearly we were not alone in considering them ‘disposable’, but how the 1967 edition survived whilst others did not is something I never quite fathomed. No further editions appeared at subsequent Christmases, and none of the earlier albums had survived the move from our former home in Lichfield. When I first came across the book, I had no idea that it was one in a series that went back over thirty years: it was simply a random cartoon album that belonged to our dad. But the fact that it contained cartoons lent it a special fascination.

At first, I was more than a little wary of looking inside. A few cursory glances had revealed the characters to be, for the most part, grotesques, and initially I didn’t much care for Giles’ take on the human race. He didn’t balk at depictions of nudity, either – one cartoon showed a naked Adam and Eve romping through the undergrowth while a knowing schoolboy observed them with a sly grin as his teacher looked on disapprovingly. I noted that each cartoon was dated, and also that many of them included references to topical events, some of which I could still dimly remember. The year 1966-7 included references to Soviet Premier Kosygin, the Aberfan and Torrey Canyon disasters, and, closest to home for me, Batman.

The more I returned to the annual, the more I began to appreciate the quality of Giles’ draftsmanship. These were not the crudely sketched cartoons one found in newspaper columns or the humour sections in TV21 Annual. These were nothing less than mini masterpieces. Giles’ draftsmanship outclassed all of his contemporaries and has never been bettered. His compositions were often audacious in their use of ‘empty’ space: some panels might consist principally of sky, a featureless expanse of wall, or virgin snow (Giles was arguably the best artist since Breughel at depicting snow scenes). Characters were often dwarfed by their surroundings: perhaps this was his way of showing how human lives are overwhelmed by the worlds we inhabit. One aspect of his work that I particularly admired was his ability to suggest depth in two dimensional space. Intriguingly, Giles was blind in one eye following a motorcycle accident early in his career: so was his gift a form of compensation for his inability to perceive depth, or did his monocular vision make it easier to render the world as he saw it himself, in two dimensions? Either way, his abilities went beyond any definition of the word genius.

By the autumn of 1973, I had become hooked on Giles, and in early January I used some ‘Christmas money’ to purchase that year’s annual, whose cover depicted the Giles family picnicing in the woods whilst, on the back cover, Grandma is entertained to tea (and beer) by the Mad Hatter. As yet, it had not occurred to me to seek out earlier editions of the books, and when I first discovered them, in a local second hand bookshop, it was more by accident than design. In doing so, I set myself a task that may never be completed, given that Giles collections continue to be published every year to this day. I now own copies of every annual up to around the year 2000, and random examples thereafter. Some of the earlier editions are facsimile reprints – curiously, Number 5 is rarer than Number 1 on account of many copies having been lost in a warehouse fire – but for the most part, they are the originals, sourced over many years from countless bookshops and book fairs.

It was at one of the latter that I saw my first Giles original. The size of it staggered me: fully four times larger than it appeared in the annual. The distinctive areas of grey dot-matrix tone that were such a feature of Giles in print were indicated on the original by a pale blue wash. This would disappear when photographed for the printing plate, whilst another artist applied the tone areas on an overlay, using the blue as a guide – I once met one of them and he attested to the fact that it was no easy task.
Our dad’s old Giles annual survives to this day, but the magazine rack is long gone. Its place was taken, some time in the 1980s, by a varnished wooden example, utterly lacking in the retro charm of the original. Nevertheless, it had the same effect on anything placed inside it… as, indeed, does the anonymous example I own myself. Perhaps all magazine racks are the same, jealously holding onto anything given into their custody.

In preparation for this piece, I did a Google image search for 1950s Magazine Racks and turned up a pristine example of the exact piece our parents had owned, for sale on Etsy... you can see it above, loaded with some typical vintage content: the aforementioned Giles annual, a November 1967 edition of Woman magazine, an October 1974 Exchange and Mart, an April 1978 Warwickshire & Worcestershire Life (a midlands lifestyle magazine), and two old hi-fi leaflets.